This invention relates to the microelectronics field in which very large-scale parallel operations are performed in a time-series manner, using pulse modulation signals, to realize intelligent processing equivalent to the human brain, and more particularly to a pulse modulation operation circuit capable of performing parallel addition, scalar product calculation, etc. of pulse width modulation signals.
With the development of microelectronics, an apparatus has been realized, which can process a great amount of information, i.e. can perform intelligent processing or image signal processing. In such an apparatus, multi-bit numeric value information is processed using binary digital signals.
To represent the multi-bit numeric value information in an arithmetic circuit, pulses corresponding to the number of bits are necessary. Since, on the other hand, the energy consumed in a digital circuit is proportional to the number of pulses, high energy is required for one operation if multi-bit numeric value information is represented by a plurality of pulses. Further, since the signal processing is performed on a sequential basis, a large-scale circuit is required to process a plurality of signals in a parallel manner.
The intelligent processing in the human brain is basically very large-scale, parallel, sum-of-product calculation. To realize such intelligent processing by means of microelectronics, it is indispensable to perform calculations in a parallel manner and to save power. A digital arithmetic circuit which requires a great amount of power to process multi-bit numeric value information is, therefore, not suitable for such intelligent processing.